From the Post-Gazette:

Starting Saturday, a Westmoreland County funeral home and owners of nearby Rose Memorial Park will begin offering green burials, an eco-friendly way of burying the dead.

We completely depend on the environment for absolutely everything we need to survive. This is a simple statement that often falls by the wayside. When you stop to think about it, though, it is profound. Everything that we eat, drink and breathe — it may come wrapped in plastic — but it all comes from our shared environment.

We are not separate from the environment. We are a part of it.

From WTAE-TV:

The old town of Vandergrift hopes to be the new face of sustainable energy — and what’s in the water could be the most powerful boost ever for the local economy.
University of Pittsburgh researchers want to generate electricity by putting conducting fibers at the bottom of the Kiski River. The faster the current moves over those fibers, the more electricity will be produced.

“It’s very expensive to heat, cool and light these old buildings,” said Shaun Yurcaba, the coordinator of Vandergrift’s Main Street improvement program.”It would be a huge benefit for these building owners and property owners to have that as an offset to their expenses.”
Once a booming steel mill community, Vandergrift thrived because of its proximity to the river. But when the steel industry went sour, so did the borough’s economy.

Now, Vandergrift is in the midst of a makeover. Revitalization efforts have helped bring in new businesses and Mayor Louis Purificato said Pitt’s research will open more doors.

“It took a long time for Vandergrift to get into the shape it is,” Purificato said. “It’s going to take another 20 to 30 years to get back up to the shape of where we would like it to be.”

“The possibilities are tremendous for small towns like Vandergrift that are on rivers, struggling, looking to revitalize,” said Yurcaba. “I think there is a great opportunity there.”

From Eureka:

The growing number of dams and other impoundments is increasing the number of invasive species and the speed at which they spread, putting natural lakes at risk, says a study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

For more information on Johnson’s research see his website.

Governor Ed Rendell is expected to sign the bill banning smoking in most private businesses and public places into law today at noon.  This will make Pennsylvania the 33rd state to ban smoking.

There are some exceptions including bars that have minimal food sales, some clubs, tobacco shops and sections of slots casinos.

Another exception is nursing homes, where officials say elderly residents who have smoked all their lives may be too frail to walk outside.

Earlier this week, the state Senate passed the bill, and last week it was approved by the House.

Supporters say it would protect people from second-hand smoke. But opponents say it will hurt bars and restaurants.

One step away from joining 30 other states with public smoking bans, the Pennsylvania state Senate today passed anti-smoking legislation in a whopping 41-9 vote.  Governor Ed Rendell said that he will sign the bill.  The ban on smoking in most bars, restaurants, schools, arenas, theaters, office buildings and bus and train stations will go into effect 90 days from when the Governor signs it.

However,

a dozen exemptions would ensure that smoking can continue at some smaller bars and taverns, portions of casino floors and private clubs.

Pittsburgh lawmakers are upset that the bill allows Philadelphia to keep its stricter two year old anti-smoking legislation, but does not permit Allegheny County to have one of its own.  However, legislation is likely underway to permit both Allegheny County and Scranton to adopt their own measures as well, a move that Gov. Rendell has said he would support.

The American toad (Bufo americanus) is one of the most common toads in western Pennsylvania.  They’re common across their entire range.  They’re small, around 3 inches long, with short legs and are usually a shade of brown to green.  Like most toads, they do have warts with a mildly poisonous (to us) milky fluid that they use for defense.  Unlike frogs, toads will spend most of their adult lives on land, preying on insects.

A female American toad will lay between 4000-8000 eggs in still or slow moving water sometime around June.  Most of these eggs are consumed by birds and fish.  Of those that survive, tiny tadpoles emerge in about a week.  This photo is of such a tadpole that my daughter and I found at the edge of a local pond that was lined with hundreds of thousands of tiny tadpoles.  Tadpoles take about 6 weeks to develop into toadlets, but it will be another 2 to 3 years before they reach sexual maturity.

They have a surprisingly loud trill-like call, one you’ve no doubt heard on trips to wetlands, lakes or ponds.

This is what they sound like:

American Toad

It’s easy to raise tadpoles, and it is a great way to educate your kids on animal care and nature.

Caution: Photos of a dead animal are on this page.

Often mistaken for mice, moles or even sometimes rats, voles are little gray rodents that thrive in suburban backyards. While there are many species, 40 I think, of voles, in western Pennsylvania the predominant species are meadow and woodland voles. Meadow voles are the more prolific of the two, and I have pictures here of a dead meadow vole from our backyard. We didn’t kill the animal, at least not that we’re aware of, but we did find it soon after this green house fly on the vole did.

From Cornell:

Meadow voles occur throughout most of the northern and eastern United States and Canada in low wetlands, open grasslands, and orchards. Meadow voles are most active above the ground, as evidenced by surface trails often littered with droppings and grass cuttings in the ground vegetation where they live. They sometimes live underground where the soil has been cultivated or where a burrow system is already present.

Pine voles live throughout the eastern half of the United States and favor open woodlands and orchards. Pine voles spend much of their time in underground burrows and usually have an extensive subsurface trail system that is excavated about 3 to 5 cm (1 to 2 in.) deep. These burrows open to the surface and often connect to above-ground runways.

Voles eat plants, usually plant roots and will damage your lawn and your garden. They used to be controlled to a large extent by owls, but due to DDT and other toxic pesticide use, owl populations have been decimated in western Pennsylvania. So, western Pennsylvania has a lot more voles than it used to.

We tolerate them in our backyard, even though they consume our entire root vegetable crop every year. We’ve heard a bunch of old wives’ tales about getting rid of them. My favorite of these is to stick a piece of Juicy Fruit chewing gum along their “runways” in the grass. This should in short order “gum up” their works, or so we’ve been told.

For identification purposes, these animals are about the size of to a little larger than a field mouse. They are grey with short, largely hairless tails. They have a long pointy nose and tiny eyes. Their claws are long and pronounced. It’s clear from looking at them that they do a lot of digging. Pine voles are more brown to cinnamon, slightly smaller than meadow voles, and have more pronounced eyes.

In these photographs, notice the house fly on the vole. That should give you a good visual key to the vole’s size.

Will this little guy turn into a caterpillar? I think so.

This caterpillar was photographed last week at Jennings State Park in Butler County, Pennsylvania near their constructed wetlands to treat a stream fouled with acid mine drainage. It’s a lovely state park and well worth the visit.

It seems that there is bipartisan blame to go around in moving forward with climate change legislation.  Looks like the nation’s legislative priorities won’t change until the Senate does.

Supporters of a bill that would require greenhouse gases to be cut markedly and nudge the nation’s energy priorities away from fossil fuels acknowledged privately Thursday that they don’t have the votes to overcome strong opposition to the measure.

Even some Democrats shied away from supporting the legislation when it became clear that because of maneuvering by both sides they would not be able to get changes in the bill that they viewed as critical to their support.

President Bush has said he viewed the bill as a tax on Americans and he would veto it should it ever reach his desk.

In fact, it became increasingly clear as the week wore on that the climate bill — viewed by many environmentalists as historic and essential — was unlikely to survive the Senate, much less make it to the White House.